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turned to Steven’s dilemma about choosing a treatment and a doctor. His friend suggested that he speak with Andy Goodman, a lawyer in West Los Angeles, who had just been through treatment for prostate cancer. As it happened, Baum and Goodman had crossed paths years before when their children were in school together. “It seemed bashert,” Steven told us, using the Yiddish word for “fated.” “I got together with Andy, and he told me about the surgeon who had operated on him. But we also talked about sex, in a really honest way. It was like being in college, but this time you were saying it as it really was, no posturing, no exaggerating performance.” Andy Goodman detailed how his sex life had been with his wife before his prostate cancer and what they were doing now to try to reclaim gratifying relations.

Steven realized that he had found a person who closely resembled him in terms of background, culture, and mind-set. “It’s so interesting,” Steven observed. “You are dealing with uncertainties, and you have been told what the numbers are, but you can’t really understand what the numbers mean for you. Some people keep looking for more numbers, asking more questions about the statistics on incontinence or impotence or some other issue. But people like me rely on narratives. You want to know what the experience was like, both the experience of the treatment and living with its aftermath. It seemed that Andy Goodman was the best source for me. I saw myself in him and, as best it could be, believed I could see my future before me.”

Some researchers raise concerns about this kind of approach to making medical decisions. They argue that anecdotes are simply that, the “n of 1,” single experiences that can distort thinking by their potent impact, creating an availability bias. But Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, who has published seminal research studies demonstrating how difficult it is to forecast what you will actually experience, found that listening to other people’s personal experiences sometimes may be the best way to make these decisions. In a particularly noteworthy article entitled, “The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice,” published in Science, Gilbert shows that we are more likely to accurately predict what we will experience in the future by learning of the experiences of other people. The key, of course, is finding similar people. In Gilbert’s study, the primary determinant of similarity involved social and demographic aspects, specifically a person’s age and shared status as an undergraduate at Harvard College. We would add that all of us may benefit from hearing the stories of people who are similar to us not only in terms of gender, age, and socioeconomic or educational level, but also in mind-set, orientation, cultural background, and temperament. A “kindred spirit” was what Steven Baum was seeking: a man who would serve as a mirror to himself.

A few weeks later, we spoke with Steven again. “I decided I couldn’t live with the cancer in me. If it grew out of control and I could have prevented it, I would regret it. I wanted to see my children grow up. I wanted that cancer out. So I eliminated watchful waiting. It had become watchful worrying. And radiation therapy wasn’t certain enough. It was going to be surgery.” The surgeon who had performed Andy Goodman’s operation did the traditional open approach at one of the medical centers in the Los Angeles area. “I wanted that surgeon.”

The urologist performed a so-called nerve-sparing operation and believed that he had done the best that could be done to prevent trauma to the nerves and preserve sexual function. “The news was really good,” Steven said. “The urologist said that the cancer did not extend to the margins of the prostate gland, and he didn’t think anything was left behind. He told me, ‘Your prostate is where it should be, in the pathology lab.’” Steven told us, “I feel in a way reborn, meaning that now I will learn to live a new life, drawing on what I’ve learned in the past, and trying my best to adapt.”

Steven Baum is aware of the extraordinary